Robot Dance: The Aesthetics of Deus Ex 3

The 12-minute Deus Ex video walkthrough published today on IGN shows the visual range of Eidos' Studios' interpretation of the Deus Ex universe, with cleanly clinical indoor labs whose windows look out upon the industrial sprawl of a giant two-tiered Chinese city. Human Revolution has a very distinctive style, full of colour and wearing its cyberpunk influences proudly on its sleeve.

Recently, we sat down with Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, the Art Director of Deux Ex, to talk about Deus Ex: Human Revolution's visual design – a man for whom other videogames are a "last point of reference". Read on to discover its baroque influence, how Warren Spector helped them justify the style differences with Deus Ex 1, and why the future will be yellow.

IGN:Did any particular artists inspire you for the style of the game?

Jonathan Jacques-Belletete: As an Art Director, videogames are always my last point of reference. I'm really big into architecture and fashion, like Tadao Endo and the Scandinavian architects; the idea is that cyberpunk is never really far in the future, it's just an anticipation, a grafting of the old onto the new.

We travel internationally in the game, but a big part of it is in Detroit, and I was asking myself: how am I going to make it look futuristic, like European contemporary architecture in Scandinavia? We don't have much of that in North America, and just by putting it in Detroit in front of those old buildings from the 30s, it makes it look futuristic and credible. If someone says to me that it's too futuristic, I can say "those buildings exist right now in Japan and Scandinavia and London." I'm a big industrial design freak.

IGN: Do you think the Bladerunner Cyberpunk style is old hat?

Because Cyberpunk's been done quite a bit, I wanted to bring something new to it, and I started analysing all the transhumanist themes. Quite rapidly, you start seeing this connection with the renaissance period, because it was about the humanistic and we're dealing with transhumanistic stuff; the renaissance was, if you want, the beginning of the transhumanist era. If you want to upgrade a system, you first need to be able to understand how the system functions at its basics, and the renaissance is the first time in the west when we start going back into antiquities research and understanding the human machine. That's where transhumanism starts, understanding how the machine functions, and then in 2027 we upgrade that machine.

IGN: So how do you tie this high aesthetic concept into the game proper?

I thought to myself, 'Eh, what happens if I actually mix the aesthetics from the renaissance with the baroque and the cyberpunk stuff -would that be a cool flavour? Would people say that it's cyberpunk, but it just belongs to that product?'

It incorporates Vermeer, the renaissance, the baroque, the black and gold palette, the Rembrandt stuff, night and candles… The black represents the dystopian aspect of the game, the gold represents the human flesh-and-blood aspect, which is so much of what we deal with, and also a little bit of the hope that's still in the world at that time before the big collapse.

IGN: You had to move between our time and the original Deus Ex, knowing what the future was going to be. Do you feel that led to any design limitations?

We didn't really think about it that way; we thought, let's do our homework about where things are going to be in 30 years and base our stuff on that. At that point, whether it matches or doesn't match 100% with the first game, we didn't care that much. Not in a disrespectful way, but because a lot of the tech in the first Deus Ex is outdated now; a lot of the televisions are still 4:3 ratio and already today our world looks more futuristic than the first Deus Ex.

Also, I remember talking with Warren Spector about this (he hasn't worked on the game at all, not even as a consultant, I've just bumped into him), and even he said "hey, maybe we just visited the really gritty places of the world in the first one and all the stuff you've done was already extant, it's just not where the player went."

IGN: Is there anything in the game you've not justified in the fiction? Everything's justified. We really went nuts with all that stuff. We had over four writers, including some great SF guys, like James Swallow who writes for Games Workshop. Our lead narrative writer Mary rally supervised it, but pretty much all our writing team are detail freaks.

IGN: If the world turns out how you've projected it, how will you feel about it?

That's a great question. I would be totally spooked. It goes back to your questions about whether we've pushed the tech too far; me and the game director [Jean-Francois Dugas] say we should have a dinner in 2027 and play the game. Sometimes we think that we might have a good laugh – maybe we didn't push it far enough, actually. With Shanghai we did this two-tiered city thing, that's not to going happen, but some of the things Kia's working on the morphing materials...they say that in ten years it'll be on the market, that your phone will get bigger for the keyboard and then morph around your wrist for the watch. Nanoparticles that can remember two or three different positions... We think the next thirty years are going to be really crazy, but if it turns out like our design... it's going to be really yellow.

IGN: One thing that a lot of futuristic things don't do is have lots of throwback to the past, unless it's something like Bioshock that was specifically designed like that.

Something's that very important to us is "show, don't tell." Make a visual set-up that tells a story. You don't say "this is what this means"; you see for yourself. I find in games, too often, we're obsessed with reproducing reality, and photorealism seeps in... Let's say you have to do the lobby of a bank... we'll take a picture of a bank lobby and we'll make it just that boring. The wood and marble could look just like real life, but it would still look like a bank, the most boring thing in the world.

One of the things we try to do in Deux Ex is to always surprise you, so you may walk into that bank lobby and find a really weird installation art thing hanging from the ceiling, made from random recycled stuff in some kind of unexpected shape.. Why's it there? Because it's interesting.